How One Team Made The Most Of Their Talent By Exploiting Culture

How One Team Made The Most Of Their Talent By Exploiting Culture

Culture.

It's one of those words that get banded about in sport and in business as an explanation for everything. Champions are pinned with the tag of having a winning culture, losers have the failure mentality.

It makes you wonder how you can emulate a winning environment.

Critics look at the word and scoff. They rightly point out that sides with a winning 'culture' also always seem to have incredibly talented players. They argue that culture doesn't exist outside individual abilities.

So what's the truth; can you create a winning culture or are you forever tied to the cricketing ability of your team?

Assuming you can't do much with the hand of players you are dealt, all you can focus on is the culture of the side.

I played in a team once that was made up mainly of players in their late 20's and early 30s. They had played together for years and were a tight-knit team. They knew their roles. There was trust.

These were men with careers and family priorities. They loved playing cricket, they were loyal club members. What they just couldn't do was put in much - if any - time to practice. Senior players often dropped out through other commitments.

This was fine when we did well. But when standards started to slip and performances were inconsistent, confidence drained from the side. Despite the odd good effort, results were terrible.

There was very little that could be done to make these players better cricketers on a technical or tactical level. We were all capable of playing to the standard required. We just, as a team, were underperforming.

You certainly couldn't say we had a winning culture.

But you also couldn't say the side had a cultural problem.

People didn't train through practicality rather than indifference. On the day, the side knew what they had to do, they just couldn't do it regularly enough.

No amount of team-building nights out, or extra net sessions put on by the captain would help: they were certainly tried.

But what did help in the end was a reframing of the culture.

Rebuild talent with culture

We worked out with the side we had we would always have a certain amount of up and down form. There would be bad days as the trade-off for no practice.

What we could do was change the culture of the side to rebuild shattered confidence. So the captain started making sure we were more supportive of each other.